Simulating quantum circuits using tree tensor networks

Abstract: We develop and analyze a method for simulating quantum circuits on classical computers by representing quantum states as rooted tree tensor networks. Our algorithm first determines a suitable, fixed tree structure adapted to the expected entanglement generated by the quantum circuit. The gates are sequentially applied to the tree by absorbing single-qubit gates into leaf nodes, and splitting two-qubit gates via singular value decomposition and threading the resulting virtual bond through the tree. We theoretically analyze the applicability of the method as well as its computational cost and memory requirements, and identify advantageous scenarios in terms of required bond dimensions as compared to a matrix product state representation. The study is complemented by numerical experiments for different quantum circuit layouts up to 37 qubits.